#or like weird 3d mapping stuff

[bastardlybonkers]

i dont actually think hes blond

[ajdrawshq]

started up Q2 since my brother doesnt have a lot of time to play p5 (understandable tbh) and . the knowledge of when this is supposed to take place in p5 makes this entire game a little funnier. what the fuck do u mean theyre doing this right before Saes palace. i cant tell if this is weirder for Akechi or everyone else

[juney-blues]

has anyone tried reverse engineering the source code to facade or whatever because i am deeply interested in how that game works

not even in just like, the language processing stuff (i think that's probably just a HUGE tangle of if -> then statements that only picks out certain keywords at certain times)

i mean like,

(ignore vergil and the gun please)

i am incredibly curious how the code for rendering this scene functions, i am curious how you get this art style, that seems to be 2d shapes pretending to be 3d, with all the weird clipping and compromises,

the broken seam on trip's pants, the weird Blobby Circles that ostensibly make up the neckline of grace's shirt, the weird circle on the elbow coming from something not meant to be seen at this angle.

you can't look up or down and all the textures on the room's geometry warp and distort when they get near the camera, the sky texture scrolls out of view if you clip out of the map.

there's a lot going on here in this engine that i'm 80% sure was coded from scratch just for this game, and i am so curious how you make something that looks this distinct

[paluding]

Updating... The Tattooer (ver. 3.4)!

Finally! Took me a while, huh. This is the updated version of the Tattooer project. It skips some steps, making the workflow much, much faster! Huge thanks to @applewatersugar for his suggestion on how to bake textures while preserving the transparency. This is kind of a repost of the original Tattooer post, but it actually has some new stuff and a few changes here and there, so please take a look if you want to learn how to use this new version.

This is a series of Blender template files already set up to quickly bake textures from The Sims 4 to The Sims 2. The different Blender files will allow you to: -Bake body textures from TS4 to TS2 (Female) -Bake body textures from TS4 to TS2 (Male) -Bake body textures from TS4 (Female) to TS2 (Male) -Bake body textures from TS2 (Female) to TS2 (Male) [Bonus!] -New! Bake face textures from TS4 to TS2 (Unisex) [Bonus!] -Bake head textures from TS4 to TS2 (Face + Scalp) (Unisex) [Still experimental] Check the file names to see which one is which, and the resolution of the baked texture it will give. Everything you see in the render above was 100% converted using those Blender files.

Download here! SFS / GD

Update: Version 3.4.1 (27/08/2023) Fixed some issues on the shoulders for the AF-body-4t2-1024 and AF-body-4t2-2048 templates. Now the top straps on most converted underwear/swimwear should look right.

Update: Same version (13/12/2023) As requested, added a new spanish version of the included pdf guide!

These templates were made mainly to bake and convert tattoos, but there’s more you can do with them if you get creative. I have to say, these are NOT perfect. Results may vary depending on what you are trying to convert, so! With that in mind, this is all the stuff you will be able to convert almost seamlessly from TS4 to TS2: -Tattoos. -Other body details such as body hair, scars, freckles, supernatural/occult details… -Body painted underwear and swimwear, as well as some other clothing that’s mostly painted on the body. -Socks, stockings and maybe leggings. -Even skintones! In some areas they will look weird, so I recommend editing and blending them with other existing TS2 skins. -Makeup, eyebrows and beards. In the old version this was just a proof of concept, but now I’ve added a new Face file template which gives some pretty decent results! -Hair scalps. Very useful when converting some hairs! Although keep in mind part of that texture might also need to be baked on the face mesh, you know, that hairline makeup stuff.

Got your attention? Nice! Editing some of the textures from TS4 to match the UV mapping in TS2 using a 2D editing program can be incredibly hard. That’s where texture baking in Blender comes to the rescue!

You will need to download Blender, at least version 3.4, but you could always use a newer version. It is only incompatible with versions older than 3.4. -You can download Blender for free here. -You will also need Sims 4 Studio to extract the original Sims 4 CC textures you want. In the first version of these Blender files, there was a necessary step using Photoshop, but that’s no longer needed. However, there’s still a tiny extra step which requires resizing the newly baked texture on some of the high resolution templates, so you might need a 2D editing program like Photoshop. More on that later.

So, before we begin, let’s clear out some questions you might have. What the heck is this texture baking thing and what does it do? Well, let’s imagine you have a video projector and point an image into a blank wall. Then you pick up some brushes and start painting and copying that projected image in that wall. Texture baking is kinda like that when it comes to 3D models. You align two models and match them as closely as you can in shape and form, and once you adjust some parameters and values, Blender does the rest for you: it will give you a new texture for a new model with a different UV map. These files I’m sharing have everything already set up, so it’s a matter of plopping in that Sims 4 texture and you will get that new texture for TS2 in just a few clicks.

This tutorial assumes you know literally nothing about how to use Blender, so if you feel uncomfortable with it, worry no more! This will guide you with pictures showing where you need to click and explaining what is happening. For Sims 4 Studio and Photoshop the process might be a bit less detailed, but still this should be pretty beginner friendly. For this tutorial, I will use some tattoos as an example (properly credited at the end of the post). Alright, enough with the rambling. Let’s get started!

·EXTRACTING TEXTURES IN SIMS 4 STUDIO: First things first, you will need to extract as pngs all the textures you want to convert from TS4 using Sims 4 Studio. It should be pretty straightforward. Just open the packages and export the Diffuse textures. Keep them organized in a folder for easy access.

·BAKING THE TEXTURES IN BLENDER: PRELIMINARY STEP 1: CONFIGURING BLENDER’S GRAPHICS SETTINGS: Open your preferred Blender file depending on what you’re going to bake and the desired resolution (in this example I’m going to use the AF-body-4t2-1024 file). Before we start messing around in Blender, there’s one thing you should set up. It is a onetime step, and once it’s done, you won’t need to do it again. So, does your computer have a dedicated graphics card? If you don’t know or you’re not sure, just skip to the next step. Configuring Blender so it uses your graphics card instead of your CPU will make the baking render much faster, so it is recommended you set it up correctly. If your computer has a dedicated graphics card, click File (1) > Preferences (2) > and on the window that pops up click System (3) > and select CUDA and make sure your graphics card is there and tick it (4). I have an Nvidia Graphics card but your case may vary. Once you’re done, click on the tiny button on the bottom left corner and Save Preferences (5).

PRELIMINARY STEP 2: CHOOSING THE RENDERING DEVICE: Click on the tiny camera button on the right, called Render Properties (1), and on Device (2) select GPU Compute if it’s not already selected. If you’re not sure if you have a graphics card or not, just select CPU. Then select the Material Properties tab (3) and Save your changes, either by pressing Ctrl + S, or clicking File (4) > Save (5). You might need to do this second step with the other Blender files, but once you have it done and saved, you won’t need to do this again. Okay, time to get into the good stuff!

·STEP 1: LOADING YOUR TS4 BASE TEXTURE: In the Material Properties tab, click the folder icon that says Open (1) and on the window that pops up, navigate through your folders and select your first texture. To navigate easily, the 3 buttons on the top right (2) are for the display mode. They will show your files in list mode, vertical and horizontal, and the one on the right will display the file thumbnails, pretty useful if you want to easily preview your textures here. The icons on the left side (3) will let you go one folder back and forward, go to the parent directory, and refresh the folder in case you just dropped something new in there. Double click on the image you need and that will load the texture into the Sims 4 body model, named “ts4 body”.

·STEP 2: SETTING UP YOUR SELECTION AND BAKING THE TEXTURE: On the top right of the screen, you will see the names of the 2 models in the scene. Hold the Ctrl key in your keyboard and left click on the “ts2 body” model (1). If you did it correctly, you should see “ts2 body” in a yellowish orange color, and right down below, “ts4 body” should look more like a red orange. If not, try again by clicking first on ts4 body, and then while holding Ctrl click again on ts2 body. Then switch to the Render Properties tab by clicking the tiny camera icon (2) and click Bake (3). Depending on your screen resolution, you might need to scroll down a bit with your mouse to see the Bake button. Wait a few seconds for it to finish. You will see the progress percentage down on the bottom of your screen. Don’t panic if you notice your computer fans start ramping up, that’s completely normal! As I said in the beginning, using your GPU will bake the textures much faster than the CPU.

·STEP 3: SAVING YOUR NEW TS2 TEXTURE: Once it’s finished, switch to the UV Editing Mode by clicking “UV Editing” on the top of your screen. And there it is: your new texture! You might have to scroll up your mouse wheel a bit to zoom in and see it in all its glory on the left side of the screen. We’re still not done yet though. You need to save it to yet another new folder (always try to keep your stuff organized!).

You can save it by pressing Shift + Alt + S, or clicking on Image* (1) and then Save As… (2). That will pop a window where you’ll need to navigate again and save it somewhere. Give it a proper name (3) and hit Enter to save it… well, Enter doesn’t always work for me for some reason, so if that happens just click Save As Image (4). And that’s it! You’ve successfully converted your baked texture. Congrats!

·STEP 4: GOING BACK TO STEP 1: Alright! If you’re done with your textures, you can close Blender without saving and call it a day. But let’s say you want to keep baking other swatches. In order to go back to step 1 and start the process once again, click Layout (1), go back to the Material Properties tab (2), select “ts4 body” (3) and click on the folder icon (4) to open and load your next swatch.

Then it’s just a matter of repeating the process from step 2. When you’re ready to move on, close Blender without saving. If you see a small check telling you it will save some images, make sure you uncheck it, so you will be able to use it again in the future from the starting point with no issues. I don’t think it really matters if you accidentally save your progress in these files, but I like to keep it clean and fresh so I can do the process where I left it from the beginning next time I open it. And in case you mess up and save somewhere, you can always just delete the .blend file and download the template files again.

In case you’d like a video tutorial on how to use these files, the amazing @platinumaspiration recorded this fantastic video showcasing the process! You can watch it here.

One final note: some of the baking .blend files save the textures with a resolution of 2048x2048 pixels, as clearly stated at the end of their file name. That’s way too overkill, because TS2 only properly supports up to 1024x1024 for most of its textures and you should always resize your final product to that max resolution (or lower if needed). I just made those 2048 versions because there might be some really tiny and slim details on some tattoos that might look a little too blurry when baked into a 1024 resolution texture, so for those cases use that if you want and then resize them using your 2D editing software of choice. In Photoshop, in the Resample mode of the Image Size menu, there are a few options to choose. For the fine details, I like the Nearest Neighbor (hard edges) option, which, even if it looks a bit pixelated, it still preserves most of the texture and quality.

For anything else, I would just directly bake them using the 1024 versions in Blender (512 for the face and scalp).

And for the folks who feel comfortable playing around in Blender, this is just the beginning! Texture baking opens a LOT of possibilities, so feel free to move stuff around and edit the models to your liking! If you notice the baked textures look warped or stretched somewhere, or don’t like where some textures are placed in the S2 body, poke around that area moving stuff and then give it another try. The main objective of the baking process is keeping both overlapping models as close in shape as possible. You may also edit and save new copies of the templates, or make new ones from scratch using mine as a reference (keep a close look on those Baking settings and values, I think they work pretty well) and share them if you want to. Go ham, do whatever you want with them! I still have plans on making templates to convert body textures from Sims 3 to Sims 2, but for now it’s not on my priorities, so we’ll see when that happens.

Whew! Hope none of this was too confusing. Need help or have any issues with these? Please ask/message me here and I’ll be glad to help when I’m able to!

Credits for the CC used in the render demonstration: -Skin by Sims3Melancholic. -Eyes by Northern Siberia Winds. -Eyebrows by PeachyFaerie. -Tattoos by xtc. -Top by SerenityCC. And the Tattoo I used for the tutorial can be found here, by ValhallanSim.

Last but not least, a huge thanks to all the people who somehow contributed to make this project and update possible, either by doing initial testing, finding issues to fix, or teaching me new Blender tricks to make the workflow way faster and easier. So thanks again to @elvisgrace @moyokeansimblr and @applewatersugar on Tumblr! <3

And thank you for reading! Hope you have fun playing with this (not so) new toy hehe.

[pocket-deer-boy]

hiii what are your thoughts on Mario Galaxy 1, 2 and 3d land specifically ʕ⁠·⁠ᴥ⁠·⁠ʔ

mario galaxy 1 and 2 are fantastic and in my opinion A tier platformers both separately and together, and 3D land is mid and i get bored of it every time i try to play it. I never played it when i was younger, this is my adult opinion, i think 3D land is mid.

I think what frustrates me about like, 3D land, 3D world, and bowser's fury is that they don't even attempt to pull me into their worlds. Every mario game has some level of abstraction in its worlds for the sake of a platforming challenge obviously, but for some reason the design philosophy here was to cut all of the fat and only leave behind the things that have some form of player interaction. Both of the galaxy games at least try to contextualize their stages, there's a framework for interacting with abstract platforming challenges (you're on a spaceship traveling to alien galaxies, if the galaxies are weird it's because, you know, space is weird), and some of the stages you visit try to convince you there's little aliens living on whatever galaxy you're visiting even if it's completely impractical, but i appreciate the effort a lot more than the non-effort that 3D world/land stuff puts in.

and bowser's fury felt cobbled together in a weekend, they just put a bunch of straightforwardly linear stages together in a box and made you travel between them by plessie instead of by map and called it open world. It's kinda sucks, in my opinion.

[canisbeanz]

Wake up babe, I fixed your son.

It's not perfect but I tried, kept the heart bc I thought it was cute, but got rid of the rest of the random lines bc I don't get why they were there in the first place. They don't even line up with any actual articulation points or anything.

In the original, he's smiling but doesn't have any skin crease under his eye, so the smile doesn't read as "I'm a friendly fellow who's glad to see you!" it comes across more as "I am about to bite you😀 "

All of his iris and pupil are visible which almost always looks creepy bc you only ever have a completely unobscured eye if you're pulling a surprised/scared or really angry expression. His eye closest to the camera is also slightly too small and looking in the wrong direction so he looks really vacant and like he's not actually "seeing" anything, just staring blankly. He also didn't seem to have an eyelid of any kind. like a crease just above the visible eye where the eyeball is lying under the skin and makes a slight lump, without it his face looks really flat and weird.

I gave him a tad more nose bridge just because his nose is so tiny that on a 3d model under any bright light it just completely vanishes. Also, i get that his eyes are meant to look like camera lenses, which is a very cool idea in theory but in practice looks REALLY creepy to have his whole eye like that, I could see it working if it was just his pupil (03 kinda does this in close-ups when he scans stuff) but having that texture on the iris too just looks grim. not to mention that it'd be a massive robot giveaway that would mess with the whole secret identity thing they're planning.

Got rid of his individual teeth and turned them into just one white slab bc they p much always look horrifying on cartoon characters and this is no exception. And lastly, I smoothed out the weird dent in his hair because I don't get why it's there in the first place, it looks like he was dropped on the head.

Also, this is very much a random thing I noticed, but the lines on his chest are really warped on one side which looks to me like his model isn't mapped/rigged (< not a 3d artist so idk if that's the right term) very well and it's causing weird texture stretching because of the extreme posing.

[pigswithwings]

What is 17776? All I know about it is that it has characters, could be a book, tv show, video game, etc, so go wild with infodumping.

If you send an ask back, I'd prefer you send it to my second blog, @k-owo-sher unless you are requesting a drawing, as my main is my art blog

i like to call 17776 a multimedia experience! because while 17776 does generally follow a webcomic format, it also makes use of video and nonstandard formatting and i LOVE that about it. 17776 introduces itself in a super weird way, it made me think my computer was broken at first, it makes you scroll a bunch in the first chapter and then never again, and it's so good while being only like 13 chapters long. i don't really want to spoil anything plot wise because i SWEAR it is so good with all the reveals and worldbuilding in the beginning.

but i will say that like. 17776 is such a earnest and genuine story. it feels very made with love and you can see that in some of the janky camera moment in the videos or the way that characters speak with each other or the specific details the story chooses to focus on - all of it feels so, so real because it's so heavily based in real* life. it's all based in the usa and it is so immediately and usamerican story, but the lives and hopes and fears of each character feel like a message to everyone in the world that it's okay to keep going. 17776 doesn't try to explain everything about its own world, just the things relevant to the current plotline and it's! so good! i like that it doesn't try too hard with explanation even though you Know the author probably thought a lot about some of the stuff.

17776 makes heavy use of google maps (screenshots of it and moving along 3d maps itself) to emphasize the Space and Scale of the story and it's SO good. especially when there's dialogue going along as you move through a particular area it just really feels like a dream or a movie you saw as a child. it feels very loving and i like that

*Albeit an alternate version of reality, but very grounded nonetheless.

[analog-mothman]

of all of the dumb ideas i've had, this is certainly certainly one of them...

a (prototyped) AF ts2 bodyshape remapped to work with ts4 textures. featuring lilith's watermelon skins and a s3m skin i forgot which i'm sorry

anyway this started as wanting to figure out if it was possible to convert the ts4 hands to ts2 but have the mesh otherwise compatible... and it's probably possible but everything snowballed once I realized how bad the ts2 mapping is--

(why is there a UV seam through the nail of the thumb? why are the feet mapped like that? why are the arms split down the middle?)

--a-hem. anyway, and then i wanted to just see if it was possible to make a ts4 body compatible with ts2, but ts2 (i guess) predates some nifty advancements in rigging meshes and modern video game logic so the limbs just looked weird and bad and i eventually decided that i hated it.

i previously shared some some prototype testing from this stage

so the final step was just to redo the ts2 body mapping. obviously.

lmao the hands and feet alone are 2/3 the current polycount

so i cut off the hands and feet, bumped the overall polycount, smoothed some stuff out, lowered the poloycount on magicbot's high detailed ts4 feet, edited the ts4 hands to have 3d nails and completely rebuilt the thighs and calves because i clearly hate myself.

the current product is somewhere between the base ts4's and io's bodyshapes and if i was a smart woman i would have used the tattooer to help figure out the remapping but i am not a smart woman so it looks weird with some painted on clothing textures

so yeah. idk what's going to come of this, but it's been my pet project for the past month so maybe i'll take what i've learned from here and make compatible meshes for other ages and the male frame... but also this might just stay a fun experiment because idk if anyone besides me is going to be interested because this obviously is not compatible with anything in the game already but this is what i do instead of making usable cc lmao

but honestly, i'm currently sleep deprived but i learned a lot more about blender and weight painting and retopology doing this so it's not been a total waste

also tumblr please don't nuke this or my blog i'm begging you

[splatoongamefiles]

I was wondering, since they use the same engine, are there any leftovers from splatoon 2 in splatoon 3? Music, sounds, models, textures, pieces used for creating the levels, etc? I don't think there would be anything huge, like maps or gear, but it would still be neat.

Also a related question, are there any differences with Pearl and Marina's (old outfit) models between 2 and 3? Or Callie and Marie's? Like higher poly, more detailed textures, or the more hidden stuff like the model's bones or rig? (I don't know much about 3d modeling so I hope I'm using those words correctly)

a lot of stuff is copied over, they rarely remodel stuff and they usually just like change a bit when new things come out.

and yeah, marina's amiibo/square splatoon 3 model is The Exact Same as the splatoon 2 one, it actually looked a bit weird with the new shaders iirc and im not sure if they fixed it

[undertalesyafiqah12]

Well come to think about it.

Gormiti Nature Unleashed is roughly 11 years old now and one of the first gormiti series to actually animated in 3d.

But this gormiti is also one of the gormiti universe to actually only have one season unlike other all gormiti series who had more than 2 series.

Think about it again, I think GNU series is very rushing than others.

If we take a look at the GNU map in ep2:

There's no way the four princes would have an adventure to find each other or just want to defeat Magor. Well, other than they have a freaking vehicle to travel.

Ik the series itself is bad animation because of lack of quality and stuff (keep in mind GNU is in 2012, it's not as good as now)

But we all agree that GNU deserves some revamped of the storyline.

Like keep the original storyline but adding some details here and there. Adding more characters for more fun, some politics stuff and some backstory. (Keep in mind our main characters ARE princes, at least it's obvious for Piron, Notics and Argom, who this guy doesn't even care about warriors and politics. Tasaru being a prince without any reasonable answer is weird. We need some more explanation for him.)

And what happened to the end? As we all know that all gorms (except fire tribes) are living in Earth Kingdom as it's the only kingdom who's survived. Did the princes does the same thing as the past lords? Like no longer uses the button thing? (idk what it's called lol.) Did they give the power to the next generation (Like let's be real, we don't exactly know how the lords power works. But I don't think the power can be use by anyone because the lords can call their tribes. It must be a genetic stuffs bc of the chosen one stuff.)

But it's just my own opinions. But let me know other stuffs that's on your head.

{A/N: Since GNU series starts at 17 September 2012, GNU is still 11 y/o until that date arries.}

[novelyst]

Skyrim Female Head UV: The Definitive Post

We begin as like a cooking blog's recipe, with a sort of vaguely related yet unnecessary anecdote. I've been thinking about putting modding stuff up on this blog, lately. I used to run into the problem on Discord where I'd be like: man, I'm spamming this channel, who even cares about this stuff anyway? So I made my own dev thread in which to spam these posts. As more and more people started joining, though, and still not replying to anything I wrote, I ran into the same issue where I've now become hesitant to post whatever I want in my own dev thread for fear that people will find it annoying. Silly, I know, but I figure that this here, tumblr, is the option with which I cannot go wrong, right? So long story short: this might turn into a mostly modding blog now.

I'm about to do an explanation of UV mapping as an introduction to this post, for those who know very, very, little about it. Many of you reading this may already be modellers or texturers who don't need this dumbed down, so you are welcome to skip to the big red UV map if you wish.

Without further ado: this is Nur.

Nur is what I would call a 'chatterbox', but she was made in the same way as any paper fortune teller. One thing that you should note about her: she is three-dimensional. I have power over Nur's state of being, and I can unfold her.

Unfolded Nur looks very different. We can see that her mouth, usually a triangular bipyramid minus a couple of faces, is now four separate triangles. We could also conceivably understand this as a '2D' version of Nur. It's flat, but it has all of the colour information that ends up on the surface of her 3D self; the area painted red is the 'mouth' part, the top squares on the left and right are the upper part of the 'face'.

Now, if we were to make a 3D mesh of Nur, we could use something like the second image for her texture and tell the computer which area of it should be shown on the surface of a given polygon. We'd do this by giving every point two dimensional coordinates, instead of inventing some kind of new format where every voxel in 3D space is assigned a colour—after all, it's only the surface that matters, right? This process of giving 3D vertices 2D-coordinates on a texture is called UV mapping. What you should really take away from this is the UV map holds the information of how to wrap a texture on to a mesh.

And, since all vertices already have X, Y, and Z coordinates, (and W is used for something else,) their two-dimensional texture coordinates are U and V.

Now, UV maps can be different from a piece of paper you fold in a few ways. What you mainly need to remember is that in UV Maps, we aren't bound by angles, length, or area – the lines making up a UV map are 'stretchy'. This mapping allows, then, for you to 'stretch' the texture over the surface of the mesh.

Now that everyone is (hopefully) on the same page, let's move on to the subject of the post!

This is the UV map of the female head mesh in Skyrim. Right away, a few weird quirks are going to stand out about it.

It is not truly vertically symmetrical along any X-coordinate.

It is kinda symmetrical along a line a short ways to the left of the centre.

Even along that line, the eye sockets are not symmetrical.

The symmetry along that central line starts falling apart towards the boundaries of the image, where there is not really very much symmetry whatsoever and what there is seems to fold more along the actual central vertical axis.

Now, if none of that stuff stood out immediately to you, or you are having trouble seeing it, that's absolutely fine! This image here should help to clarify the things I just mentioned.

The white line in the middle highlights the true centre of the image, from which (as you can see) the UV of the mesh's 'central line' is offset. The sort of lens-shapes either side of it trace the UV map's eye sockets, which are quite different.

Now, is all of this stuff fine? I mean, kind of. No, it's not really a good UV map (there are serious issues, for example, at the back of the scalp) and the symmetry problems all suck for working with it as a texture, but it's still useable and, for a high-poly to low-poly workflow, won't really impact things all that much for the creator. Painting on to the mesh, baking from a sculpt – all these will suffer for a worse UV map, but are still essentially the same process as with a different UV. The game's textures were made for this UV map, and Bethesda seem to have been able to manage fine with it.

Credit to Bethesda Game Studios. A section of the 'FemaleHead_MSN.dds'.

The issues come in more for people working on a 2D level. Making textures in photoshop? Painting some tintmasks? Then these things are going to annoy you, especially those darned eye sockets. So, is there a better way?

A Better Way

Sorry, that section header is kind of misleading. There's an extent to which this is subjective but, honestly, I don't think there really is a better way. I firmly believe that you can't fix Bethesda's UV because it's not broken. A little annoying to work with? Sure. But it wasn't meant to be another way, and it works with the textures provided by the game. There is nothing to fix.

On the 15th of March of 2012, Enhanced Character Edit (ECE) was published on Nexus Mods, in its description claiming thus:

Fixed asymmetry head mesh for Female.

Enhanced Character Edit had not 'fixed' issue of the off-centre axis of symmetry. What it had done was make the eye socket on the right symmetrical to the one on the left in the UV map. Behold, the ECE head mesh with the vanilla game's texture.

On the left: the ECE head mesh with the vanilla textures. On the right: the vanilla head mesh with the vanilla textures, as Todd intended.

ECE needed its own textures, made for the 'symmetrical' eye socket UV. There were already existing texture sets made this way (even reflecting the same eye; I suppose people preferred the left side), so it wasn't too great a problem—ECE was providing a fix for existing mods, really!

Except, well, it's a little more complicated than that. You can change the mesh, and the textures along with it, which works. This only affects the player character, however—generated face data for NPCs must be regenerated or, in the case of NPC overhauls, manually changed by the user, a thing few users actually know how to do. Pretty soon, though, people were using ECE in their character creation, and then for the NPC overhauls that they put on Nexus. Skin mods were being made specifically with use of this head mesh in mind, like SG Female Textures Renewal, which actually includes ECE as a requirement for this reason.

So everything is great and we can just use ECE, right? Sure, we have to regenerate all of our NPCs' faces which requires the creation kit and a lot of time, but that's workable. Well, not quite. Some mods have mismatched diffuse maps and normal maps when it comes to eye sockets, like Tempered Skins, which has ECE's eye sockets in its diffuse, but bases its normal maps mostly off of vanilla, including keeping its asymmetry. Mods like Mature Skin don't even use the ECE sockets, which means that those textures will look wrong on NPC overhauls based on the ECE head meshes. This issue ends up happening both ways, too—users of ECE-based textures have an even worse issue when using a mismatched mesh, to the extent that Enhanced Female Head Mesh was created, a mod that solves an issue that isn't in the base game. The ECE sockets are that ubiquitous.

Credit to DomainWolf. A comparison image from the mod Enhanced Female Head Mesh, showing the issue that ECE-based textures have when using the vanilla mesh.

Incidentally, this user has also created tintmask mods. Many of the textures included in those would have to be manually edited in order for them to look right on the vanilla head mesh.

We can see that the effects of ECE's change ripple outward without ever really becoming understood by the common modder. When installing High Poly Head, users are presented with the option of Symmetrical Eyes (Female). The average user probably doesn't know what this means, let alone whether the texture that they're using is based on ECE. If they choose the wrong option, many won't think to go back to the FOMOD. ECE itself has been far surpassed in popularity by RaceMenu on SSE—how many people would think to install it for its head mesh alone? Even Enhanced Female Head Mesh, which is specifically mesh-only and for SSE has only ~25 k downloads as of writing. Popular skin mods with symmetrical eye sockets have millions.

This whole thing impacts almost all modders. Most of them know barely anything about it. So, this stubborn ass who refuses to use the 'fixed' eyes and manually converts all of their NPC mods by painstakingly fixing things in NIFSkope wanted to write a post aggregating everything they knew about the subject, endeavouring to maybe improve people's awareness of it.

If you read all of this, thanks! I'm honestly surprised at how long it got. I hope you enjoyed my writing.

Hello, future me here. If you read this before this message was added, please note what I had earlier said about ECE not working on SSE was wrong. I have updated the previous sentence to reflect this information.

[smorbee]

how was ur banner made

oh boy now this is one we're excited to answer just because we love talking about behind the scenes 3D stuff so much!

plus we have behind the scenes stuff saved already because we talked about this on patreon back when it was first made. This will be a long one so strap in.

This is the closest thing we have to a "logo" which was made in a day Blender back in may 2021 so its coming up on 2 years old now! wow. (this is a raw render without the touch ups applied to the version used on twitter and tumblr, I'm not sure where that version went atm)

There were 2 Major sources of inspiration, the first one being this Paul Wiley logo render (who has inspired a Lot of our work tbh):

And the other is, comically, this logo for the Robots movie:

The inspiration from both should be pretty obvious. Doubt we have to say more on that one. We really have a love for these 3D logos made out of objects and wanted to make our own. So we did.

most of the ideas was done from the start. We knew for sure that the O had to be a planet, and that it would involve a paint brush of some kind given our art focus. M and R were the hardest to come up with ideas for, hence we gave up and just made them letters. But we still tried to go with a look for them that felt appropriate

The background was largely born out of accident. We were playing around with ways to direct the lighting in a way we wanted and after playing around with an invisible plane we made it visible and just played around with the colors quick out of curiosity. At some point it hit us that with a dark green color it looked a bit like a chalk board. We liked that idea so much it stuck around and we leaned into it more.

The earth was an interesting one. We grabbed an map image to use as a height-map texture and UV'd it onto a sphere with a displacement modifier while trying to give it a globe type look. Its a little high resolution from that method and could use with some mesh optimization but y'know. 2021 us didn't care.

The paintbrush had another weird specific form of inspiration, there was some video we watched on an nvidia RT demo (the one with marbles) from that time that had a paint brush in it that was impressively detailed. That kinda just got us stuck wanting to make a very detailed paint brush to see if we could.

The nvidia one is still better, but for our knowledge of blender at the time its not too shabby. We were much less experienced with texture making at the time and relied more heavily on detail via raw modeling. The bristles are just using blenders built in hair system.

The paint on the paintbrush and coming out of the straw are just made using metaballs, lol. In part intentionally because we wanted it to have a fake looking quality to it like early 3d representations of liquid, but we cant lie and say it also wasnt in part from not caring to learn how to do any kind of fluid simulation. It was a win-win.

this post is getting very long so we'll spare you the details on the rest of it, but we hope you found this interesting! We've actually been meaning to go back and touch up the logo as its remain unchanged since its creation, but its still something were very proud of!

[veetri-bitcrush]

Yo your rigging skills are immaculate! Where did you learn such dark magics, I'm still learning modeling as a baseline. But I figured I might aswell ask then post it for others!

Helloo! Thanks for your compliment 🥹 I'm glad the stuff I do looks cool enough to make you say that.

Part 1st - The Inception

When it comes to 3D I still consider myself more on the hobbyist side than the professional one.

I have a weird past in self-taught 3D modeling and game development at the same time so the logic for topology, weights, constraints and such seems to have a dedicated core in my brain that developed through sheer trial, error, tutorials and some actual studying. But I don't think I can exactly pinpoint a linear path that has taught me all of this.

Part 2nd - The Ruse

On the other hand, low poly models are much more manageable than modern high fidelity stuff. That certainly works in favour of hiding my weak spots hahaha.

Part 3rd - The Rigs

When it comes to the rigs I use in my videos, I've been testing different approaches. Thankfully, the extraction tools do preserve the original weights for the most part, but I have had to do weight necromancy to recover missing information sometimes, I made a script to recover missing weights whenever that happens.

My older MGS animations use just some basic IKs and Drivers on top of the deform bones (I should get fined for those crimes) because they were a ton of characters, I wanted to save time and the extraction workflow was pretty new to me and I didn't know what to expect next.

For the newer ones, I started adding more complex control rigs until I hit a limit where it was not scalable.

To speed things up, I now have a custom set of tools to quickly name bones and then I map them to a Rigify uh... rig. That's how I rigged The Boss for a recent video.

Part 4th - The Craftpersonship

I do continue to make new rigs for original characters from scratch because I like to learn and improve in that front rather than just rely on tools to make them for me whenever I have the time for that.

[wjbs-aus]

Examples of some games that use each style are below for anyone who is curious (most of them are first-person shooters, and all but one of them are combat-focused).

"NES-style but with larger sprites that aren't tile-based" - Literally any modern game that's trying to look like something on the NES

"Quake-inspired low-poly 3D but with interpolated skeletal animation" - DUSK, ULTRAKILL

"Prerendered sprites but with normal and specular mapping so they look 3D" - Brigador, Nightmare Reaper, Amid Evil (only on the weapons)

"Mid-poly 3D with low-res textures" - System Shock (2023), Turbo Overkill

"Mid-to-high-poly 3D with a low-res pixel-filter slapped on top" - The Magic Circle (only on a few areas and NPCs), Saints Row IV (during one specific mission fairly late into the game, and maybe a few other places)

"'2.5D' (3D levels, 2D characters) with HD sprites." - Fallen Aces

"Something else" - Fashion Police Squad (has the look and stuff, but the cultural references, non-gameplay images, and squash-and-stretch animation style all look a bit too modern), Prodeus (literally everything except for the levels themselves is represented with high-res prerendered graphics, though I think there's also a toggle to turn on models for everything instead?)

Cruelty Squad (simultaneous gore, eyestrain, sensory-overload and epilepsy warnings for not just the game but also screenshots and trailers, like seriously it's so bad that the Steam page has a warning at the beginning of the "About This Game" section)

Also, for two games that pull off their respective "retro" visual styles in really authentic-feeling ways, check out HROT (inspired by Chasm: The Rift and Quake, and feels like a real – if extremely strange – FPS from that era) and Zortch (which looks and feels like a weird N64 FPS from the late '90s, but came out almost exactly a year ago at time of writing).

[hopeymchope]

I almost always seem to have the minority opinion on media. And I'm really sick of it now.

I've been on a Fire Emblem kick again lately. But unfortunately, as much as I love all of the Fire Emblem games on 3DS? That's approximately how much I hate Fire Emblem: Three Houses on Switch. ....which is, of course, the most popular/successful game in the series to date.

Okay, look: In Fire Emblem, I really like the strategy-combat stuff and the storylines + support conversations. THAT'S the tasty meat. Anything else? Is irritating busywork to me. So if I spend between 2/3-3/4 of a supposed Fire Emblem game doing the other shit? You've crafted a great recipe to make me feel like I'm MOSTLY doing stuff I hate, and thusly I shall hate your game. And that's the START of the issue with Three Houses. (I must resist getting into the protagonist being a mute cipher OR how multiple side activities require blind luck or a guide to succeed OR bitching about the weak battle map design... oh shit oh SHIT I'M OUTING MYSELF, RUN FOR IT MARTY!)

By comparison, this year's Fire Emblem Engage feels like a step back in the right direction! I'm playing it a lot right now, and I'm mostly having a good time! Still more busywork than I want in these games, but it's at least back on the side of "more good than bad." So of course, if I look this game up and read any fan reviews or watch any videos... they're all about how disapppointing and sucky it is in comparison.

God. Of COURSE they are.

I really don't know why the advances they made with Fire Emblem Echoes haven't carried into the newer games. 3D dungeons you can explore for items and enemy encounters in a Persona-like fashion? Genius! Make it the template going forward! ..... What's that? Not even most fans bothered to buy or play that game??? So no one fucking cares about that feature?

.........fucking hell. Of COURSE they don't.

See, this is how it always goes for me. If I fall in love with a movie, I'll later learn it's either hated or ignored by its own fandom or by the masses at large. If I get emotionally invested in some weird game and its characters? There's a high probability that almost no one played it. And those who did? They didn't like it as much as me. If I think a game is really annoying and full of boring shit? Great reviews, huge fandom, etc.

I could make an utterly wild fucking list of things I like/love that other people hate. And the same is true in reverse. Sometimes, even when I agree with the hate on something, I don't agree with ANY of the reasons for WHY other people hate it!

Before you ask: It doesn't matter whether I know the "majority opinion" in advance of seeing/experiencing something, or I have no clue wht people think of something until I look it up later. I've gone to many midnight premieres of movies that weren't yet screened for critics, and I typically always wind up on the wrong side of the majority. I've played obscure games just because the premise sounded good, fallen in love with them, gone looking for a fandom... and found out that everybody thinks said game is utter shit.

So I'm not just being contrarian; this shit comes NATURALLY.

However, I should make some caveats about this weirdness clear:

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the wrong side of JUST the outspoken part of the audience... but there's evidence to support that my own stance maybe ISN'T so weird. For example: My family and I have always loved 2009's Avatar. We never were dressing up like the goddamn Na'vi or anything so fanatical, but we've rewatched it many times over the years. We regularly quote it to each other around the house. And the massive success of that movie (and its recent sequel) seems to back up that this admiration/enjoyment isn't THAT crazy or esoteric, RIGHT? It's just that the Internet is extremely outspoken about Avatar supposedly being lame and totally unmemorable. Remember how people in 2022 kept being like "You can't remember even three character names from that movie! Nobody quotes it!" and shit like that? I was one of the people going "I will list you NINE characters and spew DOZENS of quotes at you."

My "minority opinion" thing only stretches so far. It's not like I thought The Room was the best movie I'd ever seen or angrily felt Tears of the Kingdom was the worst game I ever played. That would be beyond "minority" and more "MADNESS." There's a limit to this weirdness; it has to be within a certain degree of reason, you know? Some things just aren't POSSIBLE to totally flip the script on. Birdemic will always be embarrassingly terrible, and I refuse to believe anyone would legitimately feel otherwise. OK?

This isn't completely universal, either. There are always exceptions where I actually wind up on the right side of the majority. They're just... rarer than the other thing, honestly.

It gets exhausting to always feel like I'm on the defensive or at worst, utterly alone in how I think among the larger community. I don't want this anymore.

But I don't get a say, clearly. I'm just going to keep doing this. I'm going to go see a movie on opening weekend and think "Wow, what an awful piece of shit" only to find that DECADES LATER, people still cite it as one of the best movies in its genre. I'm going to adore a modern revival of a classic comic book, then I'll go online and find that it's widely considered an abomination before god. This is who I am. It's just REALLY tiring to be here.

[arthotsglasses]

Olympia Soiree Office Room

So, yk that project I planned like a year ago about making otome environments in 3D and intractable?

After a year of my game dev college program and a load of extra knowledge from Youtube and Twitch, I made it happen. Here is my first room built out of sooo many more to go, but damn I'm finally good enough to start doing this!

Here is a video of me running around in play mode (using wasd and mouse) in Unreal Engine 5:

Comparison photo: original Olympia Soiree Switch screenshot (left), my Unreal screenshot (right)

Modelling process: Modelled and UV unwrapped in Blender, textures painted in Substance Painter:

Exported texture maps (in order of textures, normals, OcculsionRoughnessMetalic, and emissive):

TO WATCH ALL THIS HAPPEN, CHECK OUT MY TWITCH CHANNEL! THANK YOU

Now, rambles as usual:

Jesus Christ that took long and lot of work... even had to get a new pc cuz old one couldn't handle Unreal5 and Substance paint, had to upgrade...

Had to learn sooo many new things, before this I only knew how to model 3D objects. I had to learn how to UV unwrap, entire process of Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine 5.

In modelling, I had to learn the low to high poly workflow, and edge shading settings. That's the only new stuff I learned.

UV Unwrapping learning wasn't too difficult cuz the UVs didn't have to be perfect. Substance was gonna be good enough to handle them. Textile density and all that is still new and I'm still trash haha but it did the job for now.

Substance Paint tho.... had to learn all from importing low poly mesh, baking the high poly into texture maps, how to paint, masking, allllll of that, and finally export to get the 4 textures above.

Unreal 5 intro was a solid few days of pain. Starting from navigating the interface, dealing with importing meshes, textures and making them into materials, landscape & foliage generation (that I didn't use for this project yet), lighting settings, colliders, bit of blueprint.... yep but thank god I knew some Unity so it wasn't terrible.

SO... ik a lot of things still need work and missing. The books on the shelf are unfortunate cuz they weren't properly baked in Substance Painter. Some little props like books and stuff are not yet made either. There's a lot of weird edges and shading issues on the model. The lighting and stuff still needs a bit of work as well, it's not right on yet.

But,,, damn I'm soooo happy for what I was able to achieve, I didn't think I could do it this early! When I played it in the engine for the first time, it felt soooo real, I felt like I was in the game universe. I'm very excited to keep making more, and getting better with this stuff!

In the far future, I'll export it as an exe so you guys can try it out as well!

Next up in future again is probably rooms in comte's mansion, Sakamaki's house rooms, some piofiore rooms, and continuing with Olympia Soiree. Those interiors seem the easiest to start with.

comment to be tagged in future updates of this project!

tagging:@pettyval @h34rt1lly @dark-frosted-heart @vampiresruinlives @h34rt1lly @bespectacledbun

also if any has any questions or suggestions plz feel free to comment or dm me! Any feedback is appreciated!